Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Walking the Boundary
By Damen O’Brien
Pitt Street Poetry
Paperback, 128 pages. ISBN 978-1-922776-14-3, Jan 2024, A$28.00
The book is available from: https://pittstreetpoetry.com/book/walking-the-boundary/
I suspect that Damen O’Brien has won just about every major poetry award both in Australia and internationally. His work is so prominently a part of the poetry scene, anthologised, published in journals and online, that it is hard to believe Walking the Boundary is only his second collection. There is such an assuredness to the work and an easy playfulness that often belies the seriousness of what is being said. A majority of the poems in Walking the Boundary are award winners, and if you follow these awards, as I do, the poems will be familiar. As the title suggests, these are poems about liminal spaces and edges between worlds, timeframes, states of being, genres, genders, parent and child, and between the human and any number of places, creatures, emotions, or landscapes.
The book is divided into four parts, each with a slightly different focus. The first, “the hunger of soft things”, is presented as a series of vignettes which take on the more-than-human world with a combination of reverence and humour. No creature is too minute or lowly – they are all grandiose – Tardigrades, beetles, flies, spiders, caterpillars, and even (especially) the leeches which give the section its gorgeous title:
Leeches are by millimetres
massing and climbing.
Tickling the undergrowth like the ripe of a corpse. (“Leech Evening at Lamington”)
The poems move across the boundaries between these small creatures and the human, blurring the differences by bringing the point of view of the poem to creature eye level so that we experience the world on that small scale: “direct, like the ache of an ending”.
It isn’t just micro animals, worms and insects. There’s an Octopus called Harold, the subject of a scientific study on invertebrate sentience and pain, set out in in a triptych with a shadow octopus shape in the gaps. I won’t try and quote that here, but the form is striking and the sense of both scientific discovery and cruel hubres are beautifully present.
These poems look up as well, to an anthropomorphised moon, to three pelicans named Moe, Larry and Curly, and a Sea-eagle:
Starting at the last free prince, spiralling the length of his
kingdom. One hot drop of blood smears my forehead.(13)
The second section, “The Frozen Present” is somewhat more prosaic, with surreal and humorous mini-stories. The poem whose line gives rise to the title was highly commended in the prestigious Forward Poetry Prize, and it’s no surprise when you see how O’Brien creates a rich scene with repetition, inversions, rhythmic and half rhymes, and a humorous parataxis that conjures heartbreak:
The frozen present glitters like a frost
full of storefront manikins, poised
between steps, absurd in their candid
frieze, full of falling things: wind glasses
nudged int suspension, their red tongues
licking air: plates mooned to fracture
and spillage, stiff in their starburst of
spaghetti, a startle of pigeons, lurching
or rising, caught in the hard air. (“Scene in Medias Res”)
The lack of stanzas in these poems is enhanced by widespread use of sound techniques in the work, particularly anaphora, which gives the work a performative feel:
Or tipping out scraps for the nudging animals
Or drawing back their floral sheets
Or pressing a kiss onto their sleeping children (“A Kristallnacht Soon To Come”)
The poems in this section walk the boundary between the personal and surreal, with a dreamlike logic that is subverted, the end of the world hovering against the everyday. These pieces feel a little like memoir, but through dreams. One of the poems, “The Inheritance” links to “The Great Disappointment” from the first section, taking the point of view of a boy who thinks he’s been left behind when the others have been saved, to walk among dead shadows. Another, a finalist in the Montreal International Poetry Prize, explores a father’s magic tricks with such a light touch that you might miss that this is a poem about the criminal culpability of James Hardy, manufacturer of the asbestos that caused the father’s mesothelioma:
If I wish to save my father’s life, I have to start thirty years ago, when
those little spines hadn’t yet needled his lungs, hadn’t yet stung him
like a shoal of nails. Or earlier, before James Hardie sold chrysotile
But knowing how the trick is done and doing it are not the same.
my father’s latest trick is every breath, stolen from bubbling lungs
another heartbeat and another, until the last card is turned over. (“The Misdirection”)
In the third section, “How to Win an Argument”, O’Brien combines his ever-present humour with poems about relationships rooted in landscape. The section opens with a couple on a porch talking of films, the perspective moving between subject and object while the credits of the evening roll in over a sunset. The repetition of phrases including the drinking of tea and rising tides suggests time passing – a progression towards an ending: relationship or apocalypse, but so soft that it’s almost imperceptible:
The credits roll, the afternoon is cool
and I stare bloody eyes at the sky and
drink tea and speak of movies as if the tide
had not risen, the sun not fallen from the sky. (“The Fade Out”)
There are other relationships in this section, some human, such as the epistolary poem from Dubai to a partner left behind “I will bring you home a pinch of salt in my gut”, a villanelle about the pursuit of happiness, and a playful address to the devil from his wife. As with other work in this collection, boundaries, including serous versus human, are crossed. This might be between states of being – joy and sorry, timeframes – past and present, or the human and animal as in poems about love between the cattle and its egret, glass boned love-making fish, and even, in the section title poem, between the rock and the ocean – the work charged with an animism that parallels the poems about human relationships and gives the work a mythological feel:
The night is a question and the day is an answer.
Everyone knows that, who knows about darkness.
In the morning you’ll find the island still fighting
And stubborn, the water streaming from its seaweed fingers. You should not need to ask who will win: for the night is an ear, but the sea is a mouth. (“How to Win an Argument”)
The third section contains poems that use structural boundaries, like the Peter Porter winning list poem “pH” which does many things simultaneously. Ph is a measure of a substance’s acidity and this poem lists a series of ordinary substances in order of most basic (Sodium Hydroxide) to most acidic (Battery Acid). Their corollary is a series of four or five line stanzas that follow multiple story lines – the story of a relationship, the biodiversity crisis as manifest in the endangered southern corroboree frog of Mt Kosciusko, and climate change, all of which are interconnected:
6 Milk The suncream doesn’t last.
15 Overs under the pinched membrane
of ozone that pales the sky
and we are painting ourselves again.
Itching all weekend,
the boys blister in missed lozenges of skin.
As with many of the poems in this collection, there’s a boundary walked between the individual impact on people and their everyday routine – just a missing kiss goodbye for example “My lips are an acid etch’, and the broader crisis of humanity, on crops, rivers, and livelihoods en masse, emphasised by the repetition of “There is something out of balance”.
Other poems create similar visual boundaries with lines that slide across the page like steps or shuffle. The parental theme is strong in this section, where the signs of climate collapse contrasting with the beauty of the present moment: the birth of a child or a surpise pod of black dolphins: “we peered into the curl of each wave,/and I told him that he was lucky.” (“Lucky”). There is a similar pathos in in the title poem, a nod to Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” which is its epigraph, as the contrasts between present and past combine with a sense of impending loss:
He speaks of all his plans for
this land, measuring the steps out with his words, mostly
humble husbandry, small enhancements, peaceful change,
things to make his home a little warmer, to cull the rabbits,
let the bush return, and I nod with him, sometimes prop
a post, twist a wire, but I am worried that he will not
compete his goals, that there won’t be time, that like his
fence, the world has other plans, unmaking even as we
ply the wire (“Walking the Boundary”)
The final section, “A First Approximation”, is the funniest section of the book. These are poems that hark back to “The Great Disappointment”, preppers, hellscapes via Hieronymus Bosch (“like that holiday you will never take again when it turned out it was the off season”), deus ex machina in Harry Potter, heaven in suburbia while the world ends, and the lines between life and death, death and the afterlife, and perhaps, finally, the dignity of a simple life against such absurdity.
The book ends with a single anaphora poem about the worse ways to die. This may seem morbid but this gallows humour is a fitting end to a book that keeps death close while reminding us that life and death are the ultimate boundaries we all walk, and that laughing is always a sign of life:
To demonstrate how to escape from chains.
To be disinterested in suspicious spots.
To employ butlers or Grad Viziers in plots.
To choose the left-hand goblet, not the right.
To disappoint or marry the Godfather’s daughter.
To goad the quiet, wimpy one to fight.
To decided not to boil the river water.
To pen velociraptors and forget to close the gate. (“The End”)